


Burn Bright the Restless Fireflower

by Zenthisoror



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bathhouses, Cartels, Fabrikators!Holts, Gen, Heartrender!Shiro, Heist, Indentures, Inferni!Keith, Ketterdam AU, Legal Recreational Drugs, Resale Price Maintenance, Tags to be added, Weapon of Mass Destruction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-08 21:16:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12873201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zenthisoror/pseuds/Zenthisoror
Summary: Jurda, a popular recreational stimulant, made from orange flowers grown on the other side of the world, and the source of Galra Trading Company's wealth and influence.Shiro is trapped in a Grisha indenture contract to the Galra chief of operations in Ketterdam with neither hope nor will to escape, but when a man from Altea Trading comes with a deal and a offer he could never refuse, maybe he could dare to hope again.There is talk of a weapon, a new jurda, and hope restless and bright, and it could mean revenge. It could mean freedom. It could mean war.In Ketterdam, the deal is the deal.





	1. Grisha

**Author's Note:**

> I have yet to read Crooked Kingdom, so this is how I work off the frustration of getting hold of a copy. Some Voltron-inspired Ketterdam adventures and Ketterdam inspired jurda, conspiracy and plot. I see no reason that greed this season should ever be forgot.

A tap of the tin and the little orange flowers of jurda tipped onto Shiro's hand.

He chewed slowly and waited, let the taste smear over his tongue and teeth. It burned at the back of his nose. It was another cold night in the harbour but at least the winter's ice hadn't set in yet. He could pull up the  _gondel_ ’'s oars and not worry about getting stuck against the canal walls.

He pulled his cloak about him and, as was required, waited. Over his head, acrobats in jewel-coloured silk and belled slippers twisted and turned and leapt across the canal, swinging on bars, contorting on wires, and skipping so lightly over the slimmest of ropes that they seemed to be dancing in the air. Braziers lining the canal-sides did little to keep them warm and Shiro marveled that they didn't slip. 

The doors of the gambling dens, clubs and houses of particular tastes and reputations opened and closed, spilling clouds of spiced warmth and fragrances down to the water. Shiro wrinkled his nose. Van Gal had once said to Shiro that, with time, he would come to learn that Ketterdam only had three smells on the air worth discerning: Money spent, money stolen and money free for taking.

Boots with hard heels tapped their toes on the bank. "Dozing on duty, Grisha?"

"I should hope not, young master." He would hardly call escorting Van Gal's nephew into Fifth Harbour a duty, but Shiro kept that opinion to himself. The  _gondel_  swayed as Lotor climbed down from the street and settled heavily into its cushioned seats. "Did you enjoy yourself?"

"Whether I enjoyed myself or not is none of your concern and certainly none of my uncle's," said Lotor with a sniff, but he glanced back to the House of White Roses, where a severe face, tailored to a shade of blue, had just turned away from a window. "She plays drez excellently. It frustrates me that I've yet to beat her."

Unmooring from the bank, Shiro rowed them out into the canal. Boatloads of tourists and revellers in garish carnival masks slid past them. It didn't matter if the masks were cheap and paper-thin. All they had to do was last one night then they could be crumpled and thrown like a night's memories into the canal's dark waters.

"Shiro?"

"Young master?"

"What were my uncle's exact words to you tonight?"

An acrobat decked in streaming satin ribbons soared overhead. She looked like a comet, silver and distant, made of a different magic.

"'Take him wherever he wants’," said Shiro, finding his breath again when the acrobat had landed. “See that he picks his indulgences tastefully. Wait for his return. Make sure any property damage is immediately paid for. Collect all receipts as necessary.' Nothing out of the ordinary, young master."

"I'll be the judge of that.” The oar dipped in and out of the water, catching on a trailing weed, a floating clod of silt. “You are his favourite guard. Why would he send you out on a trivial escort errand with me?"

The same question had been on Shiro's mind all evening but a break from guarding Master Van was not unwelcome. Perhaps, tonight there was simply no business to be had.

"The young master’s safety isn't trivial to the Van Gal family,” he said carefully.

Lotor pulled a face. "So you say."

There was a soft  _boom_  - a swollen noise Shiro felt rather than heard in his chest, hushed by distance, and the clouds over the warehouse district lit up furnace red.

A small wave rolling along the canal slapped against their hull and the  _gondel_ rocked. Shiro pulled the oars from the water with a curse, balancing them across his knees, and Lotor, lifting his eyes to the patch of glowing sky, braced himself in the back.

 "It’s a little early in the year for fireworks."

Lotor was Van Gal. He knew perfectly well that had not been a firework. The white-crested ripples from the explosion were still dragging along the _gondel’s_ sides. Bells were pealing on the wind.  If Shiro was a gambling man – which, he was not - he might have wagered on a frigate's worth of gunpowder, holy smoke or potaschen. In any case, somebody had just lost something of no small value and, come the morning, somebody else would be paying for it.

Red burned cold and angry along the bellies of clouds fattened with snow, the colour of the Corporalki, the colour of blood on frostbitten earth and glowing ash, and the bloom of a spark at the tips of Keith’s fingers bursting into raging fire –

"Take us home, Shiro."

"Yes, sir."

"There's a good, dutiful, grateful Grisha," Lotor mimicked his uncle. His lips twisted. "I do not understand how you put up with that."

Grisha had no choice but be dutiful. All but pickpocketted of their rights as soon as they set foot in the harbour, they had been conned into selling themselves in indenture contracts most hadn't been able to read. Desperation had made them grateful to be bought.

_Stop it, Shiro. Don’t think of Ravka. Don’t think of the war. What was done was done._

Now, only the consequences.

The blades of the oars dipped down into water. The  _gondel_ glided along the canal, propelling them away from the lights of Fifth Harbour and into the wider waterways of the main thoroughfare, until soon they were winding their way between the white-walled private boathouses behind the Geldenstraat.

Of the distant warehouse fire, Shiro thought nothing more of it. Perhaps there would be a brief surge in business at the bathhouse in the morning, of customers keen to scrub the smell of smoke from their skin and hair, but, for the most part, he put all his thought into rowing the  _gondel_  as smoothly and unhurried as possible - because either the warehouse fire was none of his business or he was enjoying his last few moments of blissful ignorance.

Once Lotor was delivered to his valet, Shiro returned to Van Gal’s Grisha workshop. The bells in the warehouse district were still ringing. Thinking that he might see Keith sitting on the rooftop, drawn out by the lights and the noise, he raised his eyes to the roof of the converted dairy barn (Grisha indentures were, it turned out, better investments than cattle, despite having more expensive upkeep) with a smile.

But there was no sign of Keith, no thin silhouette looking to the sky or down to the path, waiting for Shiro, no window on a latch left for him to climb back in. His window was dark, the candle snuffed.

Shiro had told him not to wait up but it was a rare thing for Keith to obey.

Footsteps crunched on gravel and a shadow carrying a lantern rounded the side of the workshop. "Shiro!"

"Matt?"

Matt pulled down the scarf covering his face and sniffed. His nose was red from the harbour chill. He was breathing fast and shallow as if he had been running. "Keith isn't with you?"

"Not tonight. Why?” Dread wrapped one cold finger around Shiro’s throat and another. “Isn't he asleep?"

"Pidge went to wake him half an hour ago to see the fire from the roof. You know what they're like. His bed was empty.” The thin light of the lantern turned Matt’s pale face into something ghostly, a messenger, a spirit. “We've been looking for him on the estate but Dad thought maybe you took him with you on Van Gal’s business."

"Van Gal said he didn’t need me. I was attached to Lotor tonight."

"Ah. Chaperoning the merchling. A noble cause," said Matt loftily, and they both laughed but it was too brittle, too forced, and the laughter fell apart in moments into wisps of greasy yellow fog. "Van Gal went out tonight.”

“He did?”

“Dad saw the black  _gondel_ go out. Maybe he took Keith with him instead of you. Somebody was rowing and I’d bet my boots it wasn’t old Councilman Sendak Van Gal."

"Maybe."

The wind smelled of brine and oil but there was smoke now too, an aftertaste of charred bitterness. The bells were still ringing.

They both waited for the other to say it first, to voice the possibility, to deny it, because there was an Inferni - Etherealki, fire Grisha - missing and there was smoke over Ketterdam and red in the sky.

"Okay," Matt raked his hand through his hair, the shrapnel scar on his cheek from Ravka glistened, "okay. I'm sure there is a perfectly good, logical, ordinary reason behind this, just like there always is.  I am not worried. At all. I am as chilled, serene and at peace as a nun who fell into the canal in winter - "

"Maybe he ran."

Matt stared at Shiro through the fog of their breaths. “You know he wouldn’t.”

But Shiro didn’t hear him, lost in the exhilaration of possibility.

Maybe Keith was gone.

Maybe he had done it, what they had both dreamed, sometimes threatened, sometimes pleaded, sometimes wept and joked that they'd do someday, today, tonight, tomorrow, some days all in a single breath, always followed by the silent winding canal of a question between them of where they could possibly go, often replaced by the joke of a question, "How far do you reckon we'd get?"

(The punchline was that they wouldn’t get anywhere at all)

"Shiro." Matt's hand landed firmly on his shoulder. "Keith would never leave us behind like this. He wouldn’t leave Pidge like this. He wouldn’t leave you. That's not our Keith."

“Saints, I wish it was.” _Let Keith have, for once, been selfish. Let the bells be ringing because Keith was free._

But Matt was shaking his head. “His knife is still where he hides it.”

The dream shattered. If Keith had left he would never have done it without that knife at his back.

Shiro took a deep breath, then a second, and a third, sharp and shocking and tasting of frostbitten earth, the honey of the jurda flower on his teeth. Cold brine, dead fish and lamp oil filled his nose. "Has Sam talked to the house guards?"

"Saints, no." Matt shuddered and rubbed his arms. "We Grisha aren’t much more than walking and talking expensive rugs to them. We don't have their respect like you do. Not that you ever asked for their respect. Or that kind of respect."

"I'll do that then."

A little voice told him it would be useless, but Shiro needed to do something, needed to move. He couldn't go to his room only to lie awake with the bells, lights and smoke outside and the emptiness of Keith’s room above. "Keep an eye out for a Stadwatch patrol. Maybe we can ask what's going on out there."

Matt sighed and gave him a deft two-finger salute. "Yes, sir."

"Keith will probably be back in the morning."

"Of course, he will be. Bet he'll be laughing at all the fuss we made too."

They laughed too loudly and separated much too quietly. Shiro went to smile and loom at the house guards. Playing Van Gal's Champion numbed the wire of panic stretched taut and cutting at his insides.

Keith would be back in the morning, he assured himself as the night wore on and the glow of the fire disappeared from the sky. Keith was out on an errand for Councilman Van Gal. Van Gal would return with Keith in the black  _gondel_.  

There would be a perfectly good, logical, ordinary explanation for all of this, just as Matt had said there would be.

 

But what came back on the  _gondel_ of the Stadwatch was not a thing of any good, logical, ordinary world: A charred body, skin cracked to the bone and shiny with leaked oils, hair crimped and blackened by heat, face eaten by fire and forehead shattered by a rifle shot.

It wore Keith's gloves and Keith's prized half-chaps, red and white leather burned and fused to the skin, but there was no mistaking them and no way to hold back Matt’s sharp breath or Pidge’s wide-eyed dismay when the Stadwatch uncovered the body.

Shiro had tried to keep his face straight. He hadn’t wanted to confirm the thing on the ground as Keith. He hadn’t wanted to confirm the Stadwatch’s witnesses’ story.

A patrol had caught him setting fire to Van Gal's wares and chased him down until somebody had got in a lucky shot and dropped into the very fire he had caused. 

 _He reaped what he sowed_ , said the witnesses from the warehouse, nodding with self-important profundity. Not just the boy, but Van Gal! Everybody had always warned him about keeping an Inferni as an indenture.

“Dangerous and volatile,” said the Stadwatch captain, shaking his head. “It was only a matter of time.”

"But why was Keith at the warehouse?" Shiro asked the Stadwatch, when they looked to be congratulating themselves on a job done and finished. "What was he doing there?"

They had looked at each other, then at Shiro, as though Shiro was the one who was out of his mind.

 _He was an ungrateful Grisha._   _Why look for a reason any more than obvious spite?_

 _He was a dangerous Grisha,_  they then said, when the reports in the papers were pecked and shredded down to gossip.  _Who knew what he was thinking?_

 _He is a dead Grisha,_  they said at last, when the body was sent to the Reaper's Barge.  _Who cares anymore?_

Van Gal had lost a great deal of stock and a valuable indenture. That was the  _real_  tragedy in Ketterdam.

That was what everybody wanted to know. That was what mattered in the course of their lives. How much jurda had gone up in the flames? How much had the Grisha boy been worth to the business before the ungrateful freak had spat upon Van Gal's kindness?

"I am sorry, sir." Why was Shiro was apologising? What was he apologising for? That Keith had failed to get away? That he and the Holts, had all missed the signs that Keith was dangerous, Keith was volatile, that the rest of Van Gal's household and the bathhouse workers now insisted in hindsight had been there all along? "Whatever the value of stock lost, I swear it will be repaid."

Councilman Sendak Van Gal peered at Shiro over the walnut gleam of his desk, the red of his Fabrikator-made eye a hot coal in its sunken socket.

"That’s my good, dutiful Grisha,” he said.

Van Gal was smiling. 

 


	2. Agent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance comes to give blissful, willful ignorance a kick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent far too long looking for the spelling of kruge now that my volume of Six of Crows has gone back to the library.

The walls of Ketterdam's first and only ‘Fjerdan-themed’ bathhouse were ice pale blue, polished to shining and tiled with rippling bas relief wolves and branches of ash.

Frankly, the Badhuis Druskellehaven’s commodified ‘authentic vision’ of Fjerda was about as authentic as Matt's Fjerdan accent, meaning that people didn't care so long as there were pepper wolves and mulled mead to be had in the foyer and, in their hour of fantasy exoticism, they could stay happily unchallenged in ignorance and content that the world conformed to all their stereotypical expectations. It made them feel knowledgeable, worldly-wise, fit for importance, and where Van Gal saw demand for an illusion, he made a supply.

What the Fjerdan ambassador had most complained about, until one major Fjerdan technological research facility received a mysterious donation worth millions in Fjerdan currency, was the presence of the Grisha in the staff, which was about as inauthentic as a bathhouse named after the Grisha-killers the Druskelle could surely get.

The Holt family of Fabrikators bleached the walls every morning and evening, before and after hours, and the great furnace that heated the boiler and the Badhuis's famous heated floors had once been manned by Keith alone, who had only needed a spark to make a fire and could keep it burning for hours on less than a cup of oil.

Six months on from the warehouse fire, he had been replaced. Now there was a rotation of furnace-tenders, none of whom were Grisha, and the furnace had been adapted to take oil. On duty today were Thace and Ulaz, a couple of Zemeni men, who Shiro often shared lunch and jurda with.

He liked them well enough, and yet, ever since the fire, Shiro hadn’t been able to shake off a feeling that there was something sickly about the heat in the Badhuis as though the furnace had become feverish in Keith's absence.

Yes. Absence, as though Keith might one day reappear.

Six months on the warehouse fire and Shiro still couldn't say the word. He'd tried to say 'passing', but that had led to Pidge demanding that they stopped talking about Keith like a kidney stone or a turd.

"Maybe we're all just turds," had been Matt's contribution to that particular conversation, "passing through the gut of life."

In the waiting room, Shiro cleared his throat and smiled at the men waiting for their appointment as if he wasn't thinking about turds. "Mister Lance - ?"

The fact that the bathhouse's most sought after masseur was a Heartrender was just the final plum in the whole Saints-forsaken sham that Badhuis Druskellehaven was, but it wasn't Shiro's place to say. At least he had been spared the blond wigs some staff were made to wear, if not the black faux-Druskelle robes that had been tailored just enough within Kerch-style that should the Fjerdan ambassador complain again Van Gal had plausible deniability.

The last client of the day looked no older than a university student or apprentice clerk and certainly not wealthy enough to afford Shiro's fees on his own funds. Of course, whether he was a privileged young merchling master or not was none of Shiro’s business, but, when the client opened his mouth, that seemed unlikely.

The young man's Kerch was fluent but heavily accented, vowels flattened and drawling in a way that was unfamiliar.

"Yeah, I'm fresh out of Novyi Zem," he told Shiro cheerily, spooning water into a brass bowl of heated stones and spiced resins placed by his head, releasing a swirl of pine-scented steam. "Only been here four months or so from Weddle, but it already feels like forever. I guess the town's getting under my skin. You know, for the first month here, my skin was so bad, I went to my buddy Hunk one night and almost convinced him I was turning into a shark. It was all dry and flaky and, urgh, Saints, the air here does nobody any favours."

Turning into a shark was about right if he wanted to survive in Ketterdam. Ketterdam flowed. It was made of money and water and both currents were merciless. If you stopped swimming, you sank and died and the Barrel detritus feeders would pick you clean in the dark.

Shiro nodded politely, running his hand over the man's shoulders and finding the hard knots of muscles, easing them away by dilating blood vessels and diverting and redirecting the blood flow.

"Four months ago…" he said mildly, only half his mind on the conversation, "I heard that the Zem east coast had some hurricane trouble around that time."

"You're damn right it had trouble."

The man lifted his head from the towel to look at Shiro over his shoulder and his eyes were cold, hard, unforgiving. “And I'd bet all the kruge the Badhuis makes that Van Gal's Champion knows fully well that it wasn't _hurricanes_."

Dread and guilt pinched down his spine. Shiro met Lance's gaze, then he lifted his hand from his shoulders.

Shiro didn't need to be touching him to kill him.

The thought made him sick at himself when it crossed his mind. He affected his mildest, most amiable smile. "I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what you mean."

Lance scoffed and sat up, flicking the towel to hang around his neck. "Yeah, because bathhouse masseurs lose arms and get their faces sliced open in their line of work all the time. You know those weren't hurricanes. What kind of hurricane only hits the plantations owned by one company, huh? What kind of hurricane sends assassins to shoot a company president between the eyes in the middle of the night?"

Cold certainty settled in Shiro's stomach. "You're Altea Trading Company."

"’Was’ thanks to Zarkon Van Gal. And you're Sendak Van Gal's Champion, the dog he sics on jurda sellers when they're not selling at the prices the Galra Ketterdam cartel approves of."

'Dog' grated. "Councilman Van Gal is a highly respected member of the Merchant Council –“

"- who's been fixing jurda prices in Ketterdam for the past, ooh, three years? Come on, Shiro. Sendak might be using you for muscle but people don't become Captains in the Ravkan Second Army if they're dumb meatheads, even deserters."

Fear sliced through him and Shiro raised his hand to drop the man's pulse, knock him out, strip him of his Badhuis visitor clothes then find a way to dump him in the canal to be another luckless sinker, but just as he was twisting his fingers to do just so, Lance cringed, threw up his hands over his face and shouted:

"Burn bright the restless fireflower!"

Water dripped from a wolf’s nose on the ceiling to land on hot stone with a hiss.

Blood rushed in Shiro's ears, burned behind his eyes.

He worked to find his voice.

"Where did you hear that?"

Saints, he sounded threadbare. He was meant to be the Champion, unflappable, unafraid. The hand he had raised was shaking.

Looking at Shiro through his fingers, Lance muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Saints, it actually worked."

He uncovered his face. "Hear me out and I'll tell you."

Shiro stared, waiting for the trick, the reckoning that had long been coming and had probably been deserved ever since Shiro had let Van Gal call him 'the Galra’s Heartrender'.

He lowered his hand. "What do you want from me?"

"You sit in on all of Van Gal's biggest and shadiest meetings. We want your eyes, ears and everything they pick up. Heck, even your nose, if you feel like telling us how the Galra inner circle farts."

Circling the pallet Lance sat on, Shiro came to a stop in front of the private room's door, all but barring it. "So information."

Lance winked but his breathing was too even, too controlled. It occurred to Shiro that he wasn't much older than Keith would have been had he still been here. "You got it. But not just any info. Have you heard about this thing called the Lucem?"

Shiro had, but not from Sendak Van Gal. "Just the name."

"Well, you're going to hear more about it soon. It's a weapon." Lance put a thumb and forefinger to his chin and looked thoughtful. "Hunk said 'of adjustable destructive ability' but he also said that the upper end of said destructive ability could probably wipe Ketterdam off the map, so, I reckon we could safely call it a weapon of mass destruction. Van Gal's definitely counting on it to be if he's going to impress his big bro."

Mass destruction. The words didn't make sense in a private massage room with its soft towels and fragrant steams.

Shiro wanted to argue that that couldn't be right, that Van Gal traded exclusively in jurda and in researching and developing new strains, botany, not chemistry, that what the Van Gals did in Ketterdam was unconnected to the crimes they were committing in Novyi Zem.

Wilful ignorance, of course. Shiro had cultivated it over the years with Van Gal like the finest jurda. It was easier to play dumb muscle when mindless, complicit simplicity offered such real relief.

Deep down, he had always known it could not last.

"Now," Lance carried on when Shiro failed to offer an appropriate response, "some point real soon, the Lucem's going to come out of Van Gal's cupboard. There's going to be a demo. We want to know where and when it's going to be and a list of who'll be attending."

"And what are you going to do with that information?"

Lance laced his fingers together and rested his chin on them with a smile. "Sabotage the demo, obviously."

"To stop the Lucem going to Zarkon?"

"With Altea Trading gone, the man is practically Novyi Zem's economy and the president's only there with his backing and blessing. He's only the right threat and the right price away from getting the military on his side and they’ll put him at the head of the country and call it necessary civic revolution to save us all from ineffectual government. It’ll be revolution, then counter-revolution and civil war, and you know about civil war, don't you, Shiro?"

 "Don't."

Lance's eyes gleamed. "You could stop this one."

"Why should I?" Shiro’s heart was a swollen, bloated thing. It had drowned in the canal maybe six months ago, maybe a year ago when he had arrived. "So what if there's war? So what if Zarkon seizes power? If it's inevitable, why fight it? What do I care what happens in Novyi Zem?"

"Because it’ll start in Novyi Zem but won't end there. Listen, Shiro," Lance sat forward, "your indenture contract was meant to be for five years. Somehow Van Gal’s extended that to fifteen. And you can bet your old Corporalki colours that Van Gal will find some way to make that fifteen twenty then twenty five. He's never going to let you go."

He was right, but Shiro had already made his peace with that fate. So had the Holts who had, despite Shiro's protestations, taken a share of the warehouse fire debt. At least Pidge would grow up without ever having to worry for food, shelter or medicine, or having to hide her craft.

Still, something he had thought long dead and sunk into stinking water stirred and raised its battered head from the dark waves.

"If you help us, we'll help you get out.” Lance held out a hand. It looked like an invitation. It looked like he was reaching for something drowning under a bridge. “We've got good backing. Plenty of people around here want to see Galra Company checked or flat out go down. You want papers to leave Kerch? We could get you papers. You want a farmstead in Shu with a cow and three chickens? We could get you that, and we'll throw in a dog. Because everything's better when you've got a dog."

The air was too thick, too warm, too close. It was smothering Shiro's thoughts, wrapping them in a blanket cloud of dreamy haziness that almost, _almost_ made him believe that everything this young man offered was not only not beyond the realms of the absurd but was possible, if only Shiro dared to believe it.

But he couldn't, because this was Ketterdam, the city of the coin and the con. Deals too good to be true were made and brokered and people were made penniless every day, all because they had leaped without looking, because hope had given them phantom wings, because they had believed in kindness and the common goodness of man when the only common human trait that could be trusted to be constant was greed.

Shiro drew himself up straight and regarded Lance down his nose, casting him in his shadow. "Give me one good reason I shouldn't take you and all this to Van Gal right now and be done with this whole conspiracy."

Sweat ran down the side of Lance's face. Shiro wondered whether they had drawn straws or the kid had volunteered.

(He said 'kid' but Keith had been younger when they were both sucked into Ravka’s war).

Lance gulped and looked nervous. Good. He wasn’t an idiot. "I already gave you one."

"You gave me an obscure Kerch nursery rhyme."

 _Burn bright the restless fireflower_.

It was what they used in Ravkan schoolrooms to practice the Kerch bs, rs and fs, sounds that didn't have direct correlates in Ravkan. It was thought, of all things, to be about jurda and its golden orange flowers. The irony of that aside, Keith had liked the foreign rhyme for its lilting rhythm and the natural burn on the tongue of the soft fs and the crackle and spit of the bs and rs. It spoke to an Inferni like Keith in a way that Shiro had never pretended to understand.  
"Okay." Lance wiped the sweat from his forehead and took a deep breath. "Well, I said I'd tell you if you heard me out, and it'd be bad business to go into a deal on a broken promise, so here goes. One good reason! Coming right up as ordered.

"Shiro," he said, his voice dropping to something soft and far kinder than Shiro had any right to hear these days, "Keith is alive."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! How am I doing straddling the fandoms, I wonder?

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
